Setting up Gimkit classes is one of the more practical things a teacher can do in Gimkit. Instead of hoping students type appropriate names at login or manually searching for who missed an assignment, classes handle that automatically. This guide covers what they do, when to use them, and how to manage them from start to finish. What Gimkit Classes Do for Teachers Gimkit classes give teachers four concrete advantages over running games without them. Consistent n...

Every so often I take notes of things that brought me joy. I write them in my digital notebook in the form "the joy of {thing}". This phrasing lets me encapsulate a feeling and a moment in a sentence. Sometimes I'll go on to write more, other times something like the joy of waking up to a clear sky is all I need to write down to capture the essence of a moment. Below are a few of my recent "joys of". ⁂ The joy of: waking up to a clear sky. watching the flow of the coffee shop. the sun shinin...

In the previous post in this series , I wrote about a little utility I created for detecting underlined words in a book and creating vocabulary study material for them. Like I mentioned earlier, this was one of my earliest experiences with LLM-driven development, and I think it shaped my outlook on the technology quite a bit. For me, the bottom line is this: with LLMs, I was able to rapidly solve a problem that was holding me back in another area of my life . My goal was never to “produce so...

Sanjay asked me in a comment on my AMA post : Dear Kev, I am a fellow reader of multiple blogs of yours and others. But somehow I have been searching for any article where any one can setup of his entire digital life using subscription free model. I am not talking about to get everything FREE and become a PRODUCT. If you think you can setup everything using opensource then how would you setup all of your essentials. You can write a post anytime when you have a time. F...

Welcome back to compiler land. Today we’re going to talk about value numbering , which is like SSA, but more. Static single assignment (SSA) gives names to values: every expression has a name, and each name corresponds to exactly one expression. It transforms programs like this: x = 0 x = x + 1 x = x + 1 where the variable x is assigned more than once in the program text, into programs like this: v0 = 0 v1 = v0 + 1 v2 = v1 + 1 ...

Some 30 years ago, the mathematician Peter Shor took a niche physics project — the dream of building a computer based on the counterintuitive rules of quantum mechanics — and shook the world. Shor worked out a way for quantum computers to swiftly solve a couple of math problems that classical computers could complete only after many billions of years. Those two math problems happened to be the… Source Some 30 years ago, the mathematician Peter Shor took a niche physics project — the d...

Nicholas Carlini , a research scientist at Anthropic, reported at the [un]prompted AI security conference that he used Claude Code to find multiple remotely exploitable security vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel, including one that sat undiscovered for 23 years. Nicholas was astonished at how effective Claude Code has been at finding these bugs: We now have a number of remotely exploitable heap buffer overflows in the Linux kernel. I have never found one of these in my life before....

As we see LLMs churn out scads of code, folks have increasingly turned to Cognitive Debt as a metaphor for capturing how a team can lose understanding of what a system does. Margaret-Anne Storey thinks a good way of thinking about these problems is to consider three layers of system health : Technical debt lives in code. It accumulates when implementation decisions compromise future changeability. It limits how systems can change. Cognitive debt lives in people. It accumulate...

Suppose you have several strings and you want to count the number of instances of the character ! in your strings. In C++, you might solve the problem as follows if you are an old-school programmer. size_t c = 0 ; for ( const auto & str : strings ) { c += std :: count ( str . begin (), str . end (), '!' ); } You can also get fancier with ranges. for ( const auto & str : strings ) { c += std :: ranges :: count ( str , '!'...

I stumbled across this report from NASA , “Elements of Engineering Excellence”, published in 2012, The inspiration for this paper originated in discussions with the director of MSFC Engineering in 2006 who asked that we investigate the question: “How do you achieve excellence in aerospace engineering?” The authors’ approach to answering this question was a short course on Excellence in Engineering which is documented in this report. The report talks about five areas of an organi...

art002e000192 Hello, World , Image Credit: NASA/Reid Wiseman You may already have seen the above photo taken by Reid Wiseman on the Artemis II moon mission. For some of you it may conjure memories of another photo, The Blue Marble , taken by Harrison Schmitt during the Apollo 17 mission in 1972: AS17-148-22727 The Blue Marble , retouched by Wikipedia user Yann I’ve known that photo my whole life, but seeing it again last night sparked a curiosity about the other photos t...

UAE cabinet meeting room, via Camski . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at aluminum disruptions, the EV rust belt, the ongoing transformer shortage, SpaceX’s IPO, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.  War in Iran The world’s largest aluminum smelter in Bahrain was hit by an Iranian drone, bringing production o...

About five months ago I wrote about Absurd , a durable execution system we built for our own use at Earendil, sitting entirely on top of Postgres and Postgres alone. The pitch was simple: you don’t need a separate service , a compiler plugin , or an entire runtime to get durable workflows. You need a SQL file and a thin SDK. Since then we’ve been running it in production, and I figured it’s worth sharing what the experience has been like. The short version: the design held up, ...

Last year my aunt let me add her original Tangerine iBook G3 clamshell to my collection of old Macs 1 . It came with an AirPort card—a $99 add-on Apple made that ushered in the Wi-Fi era. The iBook G3 was the first consumer laptop with built-in Wi-Fi antennas, and by far the cheapest way to get a computer onto an 802.11 wireless network. Last year my aunt let me add her original Tangerine iBook G3 clamshell to my collection of old Macs 1 . It came with an AirPort card—...

Back in 1985, computer scientist Peter Naur wrote “Programming as Theory Building” . According to Naur - and I agree with him - the core output of software engineers is not the program itself, but the theory of how the program works . In other words, the knowledge inside the engineer’s mind is the primary artifact of engineering work, and the actual software is merely a by-product of that. This sounds weird, but it’s surprisingly intuitive. Every working programmer knows that you can...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Anthony Nelzin-Santos, whose blog can be found at z1nz0l1n.com . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Let’s start from the basics: can you introduce yourself? Bonjour ! I’m a militant wayfarer,...

I hope this update finds the weather starting to thaw out for you. This is just a quick update while I work on getting a new build ready for later this month. For this spring and summer, I am offering 3D print services for all of my builds. I am offering flat rate shipping to the US48, but if you need international shipping comment below and I can contact you with a shipping quote. All parts are printed in high quality matte black PLA. I usually only open up print windows once a year, so thi...

I was going through my drafts folder, and came across a post I’d written way back in 2018. I’m not sure what site I was browsing at the time, but it was still a fun observation. If I came across this error in a more modern context, I’d assume site owners are placing limits to deal with the onslaught of gen-“AI” DDoS attacks. ☕︎ ☕︎ ☕︎ I was browsing an online store, like a gentleman, when I saw a message that sent me back to the Web 1.0 days: Due to an above average ...

Here are the solutions to the problems I posted last week . Problem 1 A language \(L\) is commutative if for all \(u\), \(v\) in \(L\), \(uv = vu\). Show that \(L\) is commutative if and only if \(L\) is a subset of \(w^*\) for some string \(w\). The "only if" direction is surprisingly tricky. Answer For the "if" direction, suppose \(L \subseteq w^*\). Then every \(u, v \in L\) can be written as \(u = w^i\) and \(v = w^j\), so \(uv = w^{i+j} = vu\). For the "only if" direction, as...

Original in Hindustani , followed by its English translation (though not as lyrical): Antariksh ki pyaas Woh bachpan ki kitaabe jisne dikhaye sitaare aaj bhi yaad se nihaare Durbin ki drishti me jagmag falak aur yaano ki gati se graho ki jalak Kalpana se Chaand par chalna aur brahmand ke brahman me dubna Aise lafzon se janmi thi antariksh ki pyaas Jiski mitin nahi aaj bhi aas Ek pal socho toh sahi Ki ek pustakalay ne likhi mere zindagibhar ki likhayi The thirst for space Those books from childh...

AI Assisted/Agentic programming are pretty common place at this point. The growing sentiment seems to be that if you can't find some sort of benefit in your workflow, it's more of a skill issue than a problem with the tools. Whether you believe this to be true is really up to you, what is clear is that it's becoming more of an expectation than an option for many engineers. I think AI/Agent tools come with a lot of gains however those don't come for free. Agent led development comes with (incr...

If I’ve been quiet on this blog for a while, it’s because I’ve been filling my hours with a lot of RPG design: D&D, A5E, Pathfinder, and, increasingly, Draw Steel (I’ve been doing freelance work on the game back from when it was MCDM RPG). And now it’s official! I’m starting a job as Draw Steel line developer at MCDM. I’m incredibly proud that this amazing company is letting me play with their toys. I have tons and tons of praise for MCDM that I basically can’t say now, becau...

I was a guest on Lenny Rachitsky's podcast, in a new episode titled An AI state of the union: We've passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines . It's available on YouTube , Spotify , and Apple Podcasts . Here are my highlights from our conversation, with relevant links. The November inflection point Software engineers as bellwethers for other information workers Writing code on my phone Responsible vibe coding Dark Factories and ...